Astronaut Thomas Pesquet clicked a selfie of our panel, right after the discussion. Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, Ed Zimmerman, Jeffrey Kluger (wearing a tie) and Thomas Pesquet (holding the camera).

An astronaut, a VC/space entrepreneur and the legendary author of Apollo 13 walked into a consulate to discuss traveling to Mars, Presidential pronouncements on space exploration, and the tech/venture funding of space… so it must be TechFest(the celebration of the French Tech) at the French Consulate in New York City. The Consul General of France in New York, Anne-Claire Legendre, presided over the ceremonies. I served as panel moderator for the conversation which took place on December 14 and here are my takeaways.

Panelists

Our panel opened with remarks by Thomas Pesquet, among France’s youngest and most beloved astronauts spoke of his nearly six months in space, mostly aboard the International Space Station. Next Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, an acclaimed investor, innovator and entrepreneur who, together with her astronaut/entrepreneur husband Richard Garriott, are “the world’s only private owner[s] of an object on a foreign celestial body,”[2] through their ownership of the Luna 21 lander and the Lunokhod 2 rover.[3] Garriott de Cayeux explained how they came to own a 40+-year-old Soviet moon rover (which helps measure distances in space, leading to all sorts of fascinating legal/property rights issues) and her current investment thesis as a VC in space tech. Our final panelist, Jeffrey Kluger, has published nine books, including Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 (1994), which is the book on Apollo 13 and which provided the underpinning for the 1995 Ron Howard/Tom Hanks Oscar-winning[4] film Apollo 13. Kluger also closely follows outer space from his perch at Time Magazine.

The common theme throughout our panel discussion was risk: how much are we willing to risk in capital, human life and international cooperation?

Attaining Mars

Pesquet discussed the desire to achieve a staffed Mars landing. Though he’s still youthful (born in 1978), he told the few hundred attendees that he’s likely “too old to travel to Mars,” because by the time we’re ready, he may well have aged out of viable candidacy for so ambitious a mission. By Pesquet’s assessment, we are perhaps 20 years away from a Mars landing, which he estimates would take 300 days in each direction at currently attainable speeds. Pesquet’s timeframe largely comports with ex-NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan’s, who “sees humans orbiting Mars in 20 years, and on the surface in 30.” (Wired, January 11, 2017).

With reference to the Apollo 13 mission (which, of course, didn’t attain its lunar goal), Pesquet noted that if an astronaut gets sick or has a significant problem, there’d be no real possibility of return during the 600 days of round-trip travel time to Mars.

Pesquet’s warning about the hazards of so protracted an irreversible trip called to mind the discussion I had moderated in November at VentureCrushAV (hosted by Lowenstein Sandler LLP in New York – see disclosure[5] below) featuring Space Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly and Grammy-nominated singer/guitarist/songwriter Laura Marling. In that session, Commander Kelly vividly illustrated the risks of space travel by pointing to five members of the 250-person audience: “You, you, you, you and you don’t get to go home tonight,” he noted (approximating the roughly 1 in 50 astronauts who won’t survive space travel).

The mortality rate is however worse than that: those who exit the earth’s orbit and then safely return also alter their life expectancy. As Nicola Davis reported [6] in the Guardian:

“A team of researchers looking into the fate of the Apollo astronauts has discovered that their rate of death from cardiovascular disease is four to five times higher than that seen for astronauts of the same era who only flew in low Earth orbits, or who never flew on an orbital mission at all.”

While the study had perhaps too small a sample size, the implications of deep space travel on cardiovascular health for otherwise extremely healthy people (astronauts are far more fit than the norm) are noteworthy, as is the time in deep space. Experts, including our panelists, believe that reducing the travel time to targets like Mars is crucial for reducing health risks, as well as costs in making these space travel goals more attainable. Our panel discussed whether the radiation-related enhanced risk of cancer would, for instance, deter nations from sending astronauts into space (or perhaps deter the astronauts themselves from volunteering). “Would 3% greater risk of cancer deter you? What about 5%?” asked Pesquet. How governments consider that risk led to a discussion of political matters.

Earlier this week, the American President issued a new Space Policy Directive, about which Kluger had published a column in Time (December 11, 2017). Kluger wrote that the new policy sets “NASA on a path to return Americans to the moon…” As our panel discussed, the biggest impediment to any space travel is sustained political will – we’ve already proven we know how to get there and, more importantly for human-lunar travel, we know how to return! Kluger explained what he meant by “sustained” political will: the original Apollo goal “to get American astronauts onto the moon and to do it before 1970 – was a shared vision of four presidents, from Eisenhower through Nixon.”

When asked what it will take to reach Mars or the much easier (and less costly) goal of revisiting the Moon, Kluger answered simply “funding.” He walked through the math, noting that peak funding for NASA was some 50 years ago and we’re unlikely to return to that funding level any time soon (unless NASA socked away some of its funding in Bitcoin!). As former NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan admonished earlier this year:

"We could accomplish things a lot faster if we had a different budget, but we don’t. And we’re not going to," Stofan says. NASA has a bit of a culture of planning first and budgeting later—which just doesn't work when your budget inevitably inches down. She also prioritized funding long-term technical advancements. "If you only put dollars where you need them now, or in two years from now, you can run out of tech," she says.

Kluger spoke of the technological challenges as well: "Traveling to space has always been about inventing our way there and creating new technology. We will need to do so if we are ever to get footprints on the surface of Mars."[8] Given the dearth of public funding for space exploration, we logically set our sights on private finance.

Venture Funding Space Tech

Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux followed Kluger into the technical challenges of space travel and elaborated on her enthusiasm to fund advances in technology and space exploration through the venture fund she leads, Global Space Ventures. She noted[9]: "We have entered a new golden age of space exploration driven by breakthroughs achieved by US startups, but we are now starting to see great innovation come out of a much more geographically diverse set of startups, including French space start-ups."

Our discussion regarding VC funding into ‘space tech’ companies was timely, as Garriot de Cayeux noted that press had, on the day before our event, reported the largest Series A venture capital round ever for a space tech company (to help that startup attain two moon launches by 2020):

Japanese company ispace has raised $90.2 million in a Series A funding round, an amount it’s calling the “largest ever” Series A in commercial space financing. The funding … will help the company continue its progress towards a very ambitious target: Launching not one, but two lunar missions within the next three years.[10]

Not quite three weeks earlier, the press reported (based on SEC filings) that SpaceX had increased the size of its current funding round to $450 million attaining a reported valuation just north of $21 billion. Assuming SpaceX completes that funding, it would have raised some $1.7 billion in venture financing.[11]

Together, these events likely signal a reversal of what CBInsight had reported as a decline in space tech venture capital funding from 2015 to 2016. CBInsight had tracked[12] a dip in several measures: aggregate dollars deployed into space tech startups, unique number of investors (falling from 111 in 2015 to 64 in 2016) and ‘megarounds’ exceeding $100 million into a startup (dropping from three in 2015, to one in 2016). Of course, these 2016 levels still surpass prior years in terms of unique investors and aggregate funding, according to the report. High end funds such as Bessemer, RRE, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Lux Capital are repeat investors in these endeavors. Additionally, Sequoia made a splash with the press coverage in May that it had led a $50 million Series C venture round into space tech startup Orbital Insights.[13]

Our discussion of privately financed space exploration resulted in a question regarding the prospects of government-led near term achievement in space exploration. In response, all three of our experts were, well, polite. They essentially agree that international cooperation, as manifested in the International Space Station, has been exemplary, but will that be enough to return us to the moon -- let alone Mars? It certainly seems clear that despite this week’s pronouncement that the U.S. would like to return to the moon, there’s neither a timeline (which Kluger feels was an essential component of our original moon landing, as the directive then was “by 1970”) nor the requisite funding and that, it seems, may well be the whole story!

ENDNOTES:

[1] Given that our panel was initially slated to discuss a mission to Mars, I spent the majority of my panel prep time humming the Bowie song “Life on Mars,” from the amazing Hunky Dory album. It is noteworthy that Bowie’s extraordinary “Ziggy Stardust” album contains other space age greats like “Moonage Daydream” and “Starman,” while his well known space song, often mislabeled “ground control,” is called “Space Oddity” and was released five days before the Apollo 11 launch and subsequent moon landing. In 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded what became an enormously popular cover of the song – in the International Space Station. After a year, the video came down and then, with Bowie’s blessing, was again launched into the internet: “Bowie has actually praised the cover, calling it “possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created” back in 2013,” according to the Washington Post (November 4, 2014).

[12]“Betting On The Moon: The Most Active Space Tech Investors” CBInsights (May 2, 2017), which also shows Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund as a significant repeat investor in space tech, leading to the question of how much influence he may have had on the Trump announcement regarding NASA policy earlier this week.

[13] For disclosure, the author is a partner at Lowenstein Sandler LLP and through that law firm serves as counsel to (and/or otherwise has a financial connection to) RRE Ventures, GV, Sequoia and Bessemer Ventures from time to time.